The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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Smetana, Dvorak, Greig, whose national accents (this is not to deny their many virtues or even genius) remain mere dialects of the prevailing European polyglot. Of the generation following Ives, only Henry Cowell showed anything of Ives’s bent for uninhibited experimentation with sound, free from harmonic preconceptions. Cowell’s early pieces for piano, using tone-clusters (a term which was in fact invented by him) and plucked and rubbed strings may have been naïf (some were published while he was still in his teens) but their spirit was the same as had animated the eighteenth-century tunesmiths, and is directed towards liberating the inner nature of the sounds themselves. If his later work falls back into the European concert-music manner, albeit with an exotic seasoning, he had opened up some important new resources, and, as editor of the journal New Music, he became, in the words of John Cage, “the open sesame for new music in America … From him, as from an efficient telephone booth, you could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone working in a lively way with music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction from him as to what anyone was doing. He was not attached (as Varèse also was not attached) to what seemed to many the important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky.”21 The last is an important point; to be aware of the essential irrelevance of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky (obscured by the fact that both composers were resident in the United States, Schoenberg since 1934 and Stravinsky since the 1940s) to the growth of a genuinely American tradition was a state which Cage himself reached only in later life.
It is in fact in the music and the writings of Cage that the tendencies we have been observing over the three-hundred-and-fifty-year history of American music finally become explicit. His first confrontation with European concepts of harmony seems to have occurred when he was studying with Schoenberg, that most committedly European of all twentieth-century composers. He tells the story as if he were unaware of its significance, a fact that testifies to the depth, albeit perhaps unconscious, of his feeling. When he had been with Schoenberg for five years the master said that to write music one must have a feeling for harmony. “I told him,” says Cage, “that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’”22 Schoenberg, from his own point of view and that of the European tradition was of course right, but in fact Cage has felt no such necessity; going ahead as if western concepts of harmony and the associated ideas of linear time and climax had never existed, he has found in rhythm the organizing principle for which harmony served in traditional western music. “Sounds, including noises, it seemed to me, had four characteristics (pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration) while silence had only one (duration). I therefore devised a rhythmic structure based on the duration, not of notes, but of spaces in time … It is analogous to Indian Tala (rhythmic method) but it has the Western characteristic of a beginning and an ending.”23 The first sentence here seems to take Cage close to the position of Webern in the thirties; the last two emphasize how far from that position he actually was.
A piece by Cage, in fact, rarely develops, rarely works towards any kind of climax or apotheosis, but deals in what is known in Indian aesthetic theory as “permanent emotion” (one ancient work of theory lists these as Heroic, Erotic, Wondrous, Mirthful, Odious, Fearful, Angry and Sorrowful)—a single emotional state that persists through the piece. The music may thus be boring to some; once it has made its point, many feel, there seems little purpose in continuing it. Virgil Thomson, for example, says, “The Cage works have some intrinsic interest and much charm, but after a few minutes very little urgency. They do not seem to be designed for holding the attention and generally speaking they do not hold it.”24 This is the verdict of a western composer accustomed to the concept of music as drama, but it may also be a just criticism; it could be, as used to be said of Berlioz, that Cage just has not enough talent for his genius.
He has taken the denial of the European spirit even further than the simple rejection of harmony, and has attempted to eliminate as completely as possible the imposition of the composer’s will upon the sounds, finding justification for this in his studies of Zen Buddhism. His renunciation of harmony “and its effect of fusing sounds in a fixed relationship,” his desire to allow sounds simply to “be themselves,” to refrain from imposing any outside order on them, is clearly anarchistic (we remind ourselves that the word “anarchism” is not a synonym for “chaos” but indicates rather a state in which men need no externally imposed laws), a metaphor for a potential society, which few Europeans have so far dared to imagine. His refusal to impose his will on the sounds has led him to his well-known use of chance operations, by the throwing of dice, the consultation of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, or, more recently, the use of computers; he tries “to arrange my composing means so that I won’t have any knowledge of what might happen…. I like to think that I’m outside the circle of a known universe and dealing with things I literally don’t know anything about.”25 Boulez’ criticism, made from his echt-European viewpoint, that such procedures merely cover “weaknesses in the compositional methods involved,”26 is regarded by Cage as irrelevant, since if compositional methods are designed to assist the composer to submit the sound materials to his will, the absence of any desire to do so renders all such methods superfluous.
The use of chance operations has a further consequence: that one accepts the validity of whatever sound chance turns up, without making any kind of value judgment on it. “Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness. How are you going to use this situation if you are there? That is the question,”27 he says, and quotes the Hindu aphorism, “Imitate the sands of the Ganges who are not pleased by perfume and who are not disgusted by filth.” And again: “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you know that when you get a value judgment that’s all you have?”28
It is true that the European habit of placing value judgments on everything pervades our thinking to a degree that we hardly realize. Our minds are full of hierarchies; among composers, for example, we are accustomed to think of Bach and Beethoven, perhaps of Mozart (the hierarchy differs in detail between individuals but the main outlines are clear), with Brahms and Haydn perhaps a little below them, and so on down through Tchaikowsky, Schumann, Delibes, to Chaminade and Ketèlby to the lady next door who makes up little songs. This habit of thought is a cognate of the value placed on the art object rather than the creative process, since once a value is placed on the art object the natural question is, what value? Part of the reasoning behind Cage’s frequent refusal to fix his works in final form, behind his use of chance and indeterminacy, is the desire to preserve as much of the art process as is possible for the performer and even the listener; “Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people. Art’s socialized. It isn’t someone saying something but people doing things, giving everyone (including those involved) the opportunity to have experiences they would not otherwise have had.”29 So, at least in many later works, he provides the structure leaving the performer to fill in the actual material in his own way. So, too, the apparent chaos of vast multi-media works such as HPSCHD is intended to allow the listener to put his own meaning on the piece, rather than to present him with a ready-made meaning. He makes an interesting antitheses between “emerging” and “entering in”; “Everybody,” he says, “hears the same thing if it emerges. Everybody hears what he alone hears if he enters in.”30 Again, to an interviewer who claimed to hear a sense of logic and cohesion in one of his indeterminate pieces, he replied, sharply, “This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you.”31
With Cage, then, it would appear as if the emancipation from the drama, tension and domination of the will of European music is complete. And yet a doubt remains; the simple refusal to make any kind of value judgement, the unquestioning acceptance of any sound that happens along (which obliges us, it must be said, to accept at times some pretty excruciating sounds), is based on perhaps too facile an interpretation of Zen doctrines of art. Alan Watts points out, “Even in painting, the work of art is considered not as representing nature but as being itself a work of nature.” So far so good, but he goes on, “This does not mean that the art forms